Carmel Schrire


Carmel Schrire is a professor of anthropology at Rutgers University whose research focuses on historical archaeology, particularly in South Africa and Europe.

Education and research

Schrire was born in Cape Town, South Africa and completed her undergraduate studies at the University of Cape Town, going on to attend the University of Cambridge. Her early research interests were in prehistoric archaeology, and she did her doctoral research in Australia's Northern Territory on the way in which modern Aboriginal behaviour can help interpret prehistoric remains. She received her PhD in 1968 from the Australian National University.
In 1984 she initiated a program in the historical archaeology of European contact and settlement at the Cape region in South Africa. Her 1995 book Digging through Darkness: Chronicles of an Archaeologist explores the dehumanizing effects of colonialism and racism on both colonized and colonizer. In 2004, she excavated the house of the "Last Jew of Auschwitz" in Oświęcim, Poland.

Publications

Journals